A close-up look at NYC education policy, politics,and the people who have been, are now, or will be affected by acts of corruption and fraud. ATR CONNECT assists individuals who suddenly find themselves in the ATR ("Absent Teacher Reserve") pool and are the "new" rubber roomers, and re-assigned. The terms "rubber room" and "ATR" mean that you or any person has been targeted for removal from your job. A "Rubber Room" is not a place, but a process.

Over the past seven years, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has presided over a historic re-envisioning of New York City, one that loosened the reins on development across the boroughs and pushed more than 100 rezoning measures through a City Council that stamped them all into law.

His administration poured $16 billion into financing to foster commercial development and affordable housing and created quasi-local organizations to promote its initiatives and blunt neighborhood opposition.

And when the economy was burning white hot, as it did for several years, the mayor’s plan appeared to be bold and forward-looking, a prescient decision to remake portions of the city in order to lure companies, create jobs and increase economic vitality.

But that vitality is missing in some sections of New York today, where developments spurred in part by easy credit and in part by city initiatives are now stalled or in danger of collapse.

No question, the upheaval in the real estate world was primarily caused by a recession that Mr. Bloomberg had no role in starting and no power to stop. But Mr. Bloomberg has campaigned as a business visionary, better suited than most to lead in tough times, and any review of his term needs to confront his embrace of development as a stimulus tool.

Administration officials say their development initiatives created jobs and housing and revitalized moribund areas, like downtown Jamaica, Queens. Across the city, residential construction doubled under Mr. Bloomberg, to more than 30,000 units a year from 2004 through 2008, before slowing this year.

Construction spending has also doubled since he took office, reaching a high of $32 billion in 2008, according to the New York City Building Congress. The organization projects a 20 percent drop this year.

And if the skyline seems little changed despite the rezoning of some 8,400 blocks, the impact can be seen in old, outlying factory neighborhoods where new housing has risen, or in places like Flushing, Queens, and the Bronx, where signature new baseball stadiums were built.

But things have not gone according to plan in neighborhoods like Downtown Brooklyn, which was rezoned to foster development of new office towers to compete with New Jersey. None have gone up, and other projects, like City Point, a commercial, retail and apartment complex on Fulton Street, have stalled.

Daniel L. Doctoroff, who served as Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development, said it was naïve to view the initiatives in the short term.

“It’s always tempting to sit there and say, ‘Here we are, we’re at the depth of a recession, and therefore, look at all this stuff, it didn’t make sense,’ ” he said. “That is the kind of thinking that has proven time and time again to be completely fallacious when you look at New York City history.”

Ron Shiffman, a former city planning commissioner, said a flaw in the mayor’s approach was its failure to do enough to reap public benefits from a real estate industry he had so readily fostered.

“He didn’t steer the boom,” Mr. Shiffman said. “He did not direct it in such a way that it benefited a more diverse set of populations in the city of New York, and more diverse income groups. It was basically developer-driven.”

Remapping the Future

The administration’s economic development policies started with a simple concept: New York must grow to compete with other cities.

Development became the means toward that end. Create new opportunities for developers, the wisdom held, and good things will happen for New York as a whole. Companies will rush to glorious new towers in reinvented neighborhoods, diversifying the city’s economy in the process.

Many mayors have favored the real estate industry, whose campaign contributions are often generous. Mr. Bloomberg lobbied forcefully for developers even though he did not need their money.

“I think a mistake that mayors have made,” said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, “is that they’ve really only been willing to push projects where they would be around to cut the ribbon to open the project, and what this mayor has done is to take the long-term view.”

The first obstacle to remaking the city was the lack of available parcels for large-scale development. Rezoning became the solution, Mr. Doctoroff said. He had headed the committee that sought to bring the Olympics to the city and had become familiar with largely undeveloped tracts outside the Manhattan core, like sites along the Brooklyn waterfront.

“That sort of became the genesis for the effort,” he said in a 2007 interview.

The effort became the most extensive rezoning in modern city history. Sections in all the boroughs were rezoned to boost their development potential. Fallow factory sites were recast as places for housing or office towers as the city confronted the idea that it was no longer a manufacturing center. At the same time, the city reduced allowable densities in many neighborhoods that were troubled by illegal or unpopular development.

The City Council adopted every rezoning without major revision. So far, one-fifth of the city has been rezoned.

The development zeal was driven by a projection that the city’s population would grow by one million by 2030.

The city hired two consulting firms at a cost of more than $1.5 million to explore how the extra people could be accommodated. Drawing from that work, the administration created its vision for the future, known as PlaNYC, which was released by the mayor on Earth Day 2007 and included a host of environmental initiatives, like planting a million trees.

“Let’s face up to the fact that our population growth is putting our city on a collision course with the environment, which itself is growing more unstable and uncertain,” Mr. Bloomberg said at the time. “To accommodate nearly a million more New Yorkers, we are going to have to create hundreds of thousands of new homes.”

Seeding Progress

New York City has frequently used money to spur development. Under Mr. Bloomberg, the city drastically increased the low-cost financing it made available to developers, in part because Mr. Doctoroff, a former investment banker, recognized the unrealized potential in some of the city’s balance sheets.

Most of the infusion cost little or nothing to taxpayers. It came in the form of low-interest loans to developers, with money raised by issuing bonds.

The Housing Development Corporation, for example, a public benefit corporation intended to foster affordable-housing construction, has issued $8.1 billion in bonds to support development under Mr. Bloomberg, more than triple the total issued during the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Another quasi-public agency, the Industrial Development Agency, has authorized more than $6.1 billion in new debt since Mr. Bloomberg took office — about 50 percent more than during Mr. Giuliani’s tenure. The largest pieces of that package helped finance new baseball stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets.

The figures for both agencies do not include Liberty Bonds, which were part of the 9/11 federal aid package.

Legally, the city is not responsible for debt incurred by its public benefit corporations, even in the unlikely event that the underlying projects and other financial institutions involved in the bond transactions collapsed. But officials said the city could feel compelled to help bondholders so as to protect the ratings on its other bonds.

“For all practical purposes, if H.D.C. went belly-up, there would be some expectation of the city making good on it,” said Doug Turetsky, a spokesman for the city’s nonpartisan Independent Budget Office.

At times, urban planners have questioned whether the Bloomberg administration has gone overboard in offering incentives to developers. The Hudson Yards on the West Side of Manhattan have been looked at successively as a potential Olympic venue, a football stadium and now an urban village. And the city, through a specially created authority, has issued $2.1 billion in debt to pay for the extension of the No. 7 subway line to the area.

The debt is supposed to be paid from taxes generated by the new development, but if no development occurs, the city could be on the hook for $100 million a year in payments.

A 2007 report by the New York City Bar Association said the Hudson Yards financing scheme “bears an eerie resemblance to the development of Battery Park City,” which nearly defaulted and helped plunge the city into a fiscal crisis in the 1970s. And, it asked, if development of the West Side is inevitable, “why should costly artificial economic incentives be offered to encourage that development?”

Mr. Bloomberg’s Democratic challenger in next Tuesday’s election, Comptroller William C. Thompson, has said the mayor focuses too much on large developments that go to favored builders who receive wasteful subsidies.

When the new Yankee Stadium came up in Tuesday night’s debate, he said: “This is just another example of a giveaway, of the mayor’s giveaway to another one of his developer friends in the city,”

Bloomberg officials say that much of their lending was done to build or preserve 165,000 units of what the administration considers to be affordable housing, an ambitious plan for which the mayor has received many accolades. They point to vastly reinvented areas outside Manhattan’s wealthy core, like the Melrose section of the Bronx, where city financing underwrote new housing developments.

But some of the housing has been for families earning more than $100,000 a year, and some of the income limits expire after 15 years. The Housing Development Corporation has also provided hundreds of millions of dollars in financing that, in the view of advocates for moderately priced housing, subsidized market-rate apartments because the developers enjoyed outsize savings in exchange for a small number of lower-income units.

Marc Jahr, president of the corporation, said that nearly half of the 43,000 apartments it has financed through the mayor’s affordable housing program had been for people who earned 60 percent or less of the area’s median income, or about $46,000 a year for a family of four.

“We think that’s a good, balanced housing plan,” he said, “and one that’s important to the neighborhoods and important to the city to sustain over time.”

Some housing advocates say the gain in moderately priced housing units has been offset by the loss of 200,000 apartments that switched back to market rates under state rent-regulation laws that they say Mr. Bloomberg did not push Albany to change.

“Everyone will admit that New York City can’t build its way out of its affordable housing crisis,” said Mario Mazzoni, lead organizer at the Metropolitan Council on Housing, a tenants’ rights organization. “If you are talking about building affordable housing, the way they conceive of it is as a massive subsidy to developers.”

Grass Roots

Redevelopment can look easy on paper, but there are always neighborhood concerns, even in a place like Willets Point, a 62-acre industrial shanty town of body shops and scrap yards near the Mets’ stadium in Queens. The administration viewed it as an area ripe for economic development if the 225 existing businesses could be cleared.

But such ambitions had flummoxed city planners for decades. No less a builder than Robert Moses had been unable to make room in the area for the 1964 World’s Fair.

Mr. Doctoroff was determined to do better, through a local business group, the Flushing-Willets Point Local Development Corporation, which received half its money from the city. But about half the group’s money was spent doing something not allowed under state law: lobbying city officials. The group’s lobbying, has led to an investigation by the attorney general’s office.

That investigation has expanded into the activities of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, which the city helped create in 2006 to help push through development plans following a broad rezoning of the area.

The city awarded the group a $6 million three-year no-bid contract. The group raised another $1.1 million in private donations, tax records show. And Mr. Doctoroff installed a top aide, Joe Chan, to run it. The partnership has become a key voice for the development of Downtown Brooklyn, inserting itself, critics say, into the debate over a plan to build a Nets area and high-rises at the Atlantic Yards. It has spent some $200,000 on lobbying expenses. Councilman Lewis A. Fidler complained last year that the partnership was using public funds to promote Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing plan.

Citing the investigation, city officials declined to discuss the Brooklyn group’s lobbying, as did Mr. Chan.

A Dream Falls Short

For years, Downtown Brooklyn resembled the textbook definition of back-office space. Class B. Schleppy. No buzz.

Even after the MetroTech development began to emerge in the 1980s, and with it came major corporations like Chase and KeySpan, the core commercial district excited few people.

In 2004, sparked by a push from local business leaders, the city rezoned 22 blocks. The new zoning anticipated 4.5 million square feet of office and commercial space that might keep businesses from moving to New Jersey, as well as 1,000 new apartments. There were hopes for 18,500 new office jobs and 8,000 construction jobs.

Today, much of this future remains unrealized. There are no new office towers. Luxury apartment buildings went up, but many units remain unsold and retail space is unrented, victims of the downturn and a construction glut.

“It seems like in a lot of places, the attitude has been like a field of dreams: If you zone it, they will come,” said Robert Perris, district manager of Brooklyn Community Board 2, which includes the downtown area. “It’s been kind of a mixed bag here.”

Indeed, companies like Bear Stearns have disappeared. Others, like JPMorgan Chase & Company, have downsized their Brooklyn operations. New condo buildings are cutting prices. Several planned projects are stalled as empty lots. Across the city, officials say, the recession has contributed to the stopping of work at about 450 projects.

James Whelan, the former head of the Downtown Brooklyn Council, which created the rezoning plan, sees the new residential development, especially along Flatbush Avenue, which developers once ignored, as an early sign of success. “Is there a commercial office tower built as part of the Downtown Brooklyn plan as we sit here today?” Mr. Whelan said. “No. When is it going to be built? It’s not clear. But as history shows, development is a long-term issue in New York City.”

A similar predicament is evident in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, two old, industrial waterfront neighborhoods in Brooklyn. A 2005 rezoning set off speculation that sent land prices rising to Manhattan levels. Gleaming glass-and-steel structures went up. Now many of them are nearly empty. Other projects foundered on shaky financing.

Now the administration is working to rescue struggling projects. The long-stalled City Point development is to get $20 million in recovery bonds.

In July, when scores of other new condominiums were not selling, and developers risked default, Mr. Bloomberg and the Council stepped in to announce a $20 million pilot program to buy the empty units and use them as affordable housing.

“Private developments that sit vacant or unfinished could have a destabilizing effect on our neighborhoods, but we’re not about to let that happen,” said Mr. Bloomberg.

Actually, Mr. Bloomberg most likely fostered some of the real estate speculation with policies that invited development. But even those who say the mayor’s development record is mixed credit him for taking a long view.

“For good or bad, the rezonings will probably be his most significant development legacy,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, an independent research group. “They’ve never got as much attention as the large-scale development projects he was pushing, like the Olympic stadium, but the rezonings are what will ultimately transform a large chunk of the city. Developers will be rebuilding on these for years to come.”

Charles V. Bagli and Jo Craven McGinty contributed reporting.

March 26, 2008Ex-Official Cleared to Continue Work on Big City ProjectsBy PATRICK McGEEHAN and RAY RIVERA, NY TIMES

The city’s Conflicts of Interest Board cleared the way Tuesday for Daniel L. Doctoroff, who left City Hall for a private position two months ago, to remain involved in a range of city projects that were begun while he was deputy mayor for economic development.

In response to a request from the Bloomberg administration, the board gave its approval for Mr. Doctoroff to remain on the boards of the Hudson River Park Trust and the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, and to serve as an unpaid adviser on the proposed Moynihan Station and Queens West projects.

The board, whose five members are mayoral appointees, also approved Mr. Doctoroff’s participation in the mayor’s sweeping environmental initiatives collectively known as PlaNYC, which includes his congestion pricing plan.

The board’s decision underscores a reality that has often been noted in the city’s development community: Mr. Doctoroff may have left City Hall, but he remains a participant in — and has a big influence over — what is going to be built.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made it clear that he would continue to rely on Mr. Doctoroff’s expertise on development issues when he announced in December that Mr. Doctoroff was stepping down from his city position to take over as president of Bloomberg L.P., the financial and media giant the mayor founded. Mr. Doctoroff’s last day in office was Jan. 11.

It is not unprecedented for former city officials to be involved with public projects, but in the case of Mr. Doctoroff, the city’s longest-serving deputy mayor for economic development, the list is so long and varied that city officials and even some who serve on boards with him have expressed confusion about his roles. In response, City Hall circulated a memo in January advising city employees how to interact with him.

For a year after leaving public service, former officials are strictly prohibited from appearing before any city agency within the branch of government where they served; the ban is even longer if the subject is one in which the official was directly involved. The prohibitions do not apply, however, if the official is appearing on behalf of the mayor or another government agency.

Some questions about Mr. Doctoroff’s future role remain unanswered.

The board’s 10-page opinion did not address his participation in development decisions about the West Side railyards, known as Hudson Yards, although the city had asked for a ruling on the matter.

John Gallagher, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said the board did not address that issue after Mr. Doctoroff decided against seeking to remain chairman of the Hudson Yards Development Corporation, the public benefit corporation working on the project with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Rather than retain the mayorally appointed position, he decided to seek to stay on as an adviser. The development corporation has asked the conflicts board for a ruling on that as well, a decision that is pending, Mr. Gallagher said.

Mr. Doctoroff has been a key negotiator in the selection of a developer on the Hudson Yards project. Mr. Gallagher said that because Mr. Doctoroff served on the transportation authority’s selection panel as a private citizen, he did not need a waiver from the conflicts board. But he was appointed to that panel by the Hudson Yards Development Corporation when he was its chairman, and he held the chairmanship through his office as deputy mayor.

On Wednesday, the transportation authority is expected to grant development rights over the railyards, a 26-acre slice of Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River, to Tishman Speyer, one of Manhattan’s largest real estate operators.

Mr. Doctoroff met during the week of March 10 with the teams of developers competing for the billion-dollar project, according to members of the teams, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to offend Mr. Doctoroff.

Even after he left later on a business trip to Asia, Mr. Doctoroff remained in constant contact with the selection committee throughout the deliberations.

A spokeswoman for Bloomberg L.P. said Mr. Doctoroff was still in Asia on Tuesday and declined to make him available for comment. In an interview last month, however, Mr. Doctoroff dismissed the notion that there might be a conflict of interest between his continuing work for the city and his new role at Bloomberg.

“Certainly, if I felt it was going to create conflict that I thought was going to be harmful to the company, I wouldn’t do it, and I’d be the same way with the city,” he said. “If there was a conflict, I just wouldn’t do it.”

At the time of that Feb. 22 interview, Mr. Doctoroff also insisted that his involvement with the city had been limited since leaving office. He said he had spent just eight hours in meetings about city matters, including congestion pricing and Moynihan Station. That did not include the recent railyard negotiations.

“I care deeply about these projects, I care deeply about the city, despite the fact I don’t work there anymore,” Mr. Doctoroff said in the interview. “I have, in some cases, spent six years on some of these things, and so you know if I’m needed, I’m going to help.”

The opinion issued on Tuesday limits the role he can play in matters involving Vornado Realty, which owns the building housing the Bloomberg L.P. headquarters. The company is negotiating with Vornado for additional space.

The board said that given Mr. Doctoroff’s knowledge, it was best for the city for Mr. Doctoroff to continue his involvement with the Moynihan Station plans. Vornado is a developer of the station project and was one of the companies vying to develop the railyards with whom Mr. Doctoroff met earlier this month. On March 12, Mr. Doctoroff met with the Vornado chairman, Steven Roth, and the M.T.A. selection panel, and last Friday with David Greenbaum, a top Vornado executive.

The opinion advises Mr. Doctoroff to recuse himself from any discussions between Bloomberg L.P. and Vornado for one year from the date of the conclusion of the Moynihan Station negotiations, and from all dealings involving Vornado or Bloomberg L.P. in any of the other projects addressed in the ruling.

Gene Russianoff, a senior lawyer for the New York Public Interest Research Group, said he agreed with much of the ruling but was troubled by the absence of the railyards and the station exception.

“I can see recusing himself from landlord-tenant matters with Vornado, but is Vornado going to say, ‘O.K., we’re going to jack up the rent when we’re trying to make some kind of deal over Moynihan,’ ” Mr. Russianoff said.

Brian D'Agostino is a social scientist, author, and educator. He was a New York City public school teacher for eleven years and served as a United Federation of Teachers chapter leader. Brian is currently an independent statistical and policy analyst; visit him at Brian D'Agostino, PH.D

Michael Bloomberg claims to have revolutionized and brought accountability to a vast, dysfunctional public school system. The Obama administration believes him, and promotes his education reforms as a model for the country. But the billionaire mayor’s Democratic challenger Bill Thompson and other critics with insider knowledge are contesting these claims. Thompson was president of the city’s Board of Education the six years before Bloomberg was first elected in 2001, and served as city Comptroller for the last eight.

Bloomberg’s campaign has produced three glossy mailings that favorably compare his eight years of school reform with Thompson’s record as Board president. The mayor claims that he “eliminated wasteful bureaucracy that was doing nothing to educate our kids” and attacks Thompson for supporting “a plan to create more bureaucracy in the schools,” citing several New York Times articles from December 1996. But the plan described in these articles simply gave the chancellor some hiring and firing authority over 32 district superintendents, who had previously reported solely to their local school boards. Bloomberg knows very well this was a necessary corrective for local corruption and patronage politics. Referring to the plan, the Times’ editors wrote: “For the first time in years, New York City can have real hope about its public school system.”

While Thompson helped lay this foundation for further improvement, what Bloomberg added to it was, well, bureaucracy. The 2002 legislation establishing mayoral control had retained the local school districts and simply gave the mayor authority to hire the chancellor and a majority of the Board of Education. Not content to share power with local communities, as required under the legislation, Bloomberg and his chancellor Joel Klein dismantled the 32 district offices and created a centralized bureaucracy with ten regional superintendents, about a hundred “local instructional supervisors” under them, and an army of math and literacy “coaches” to enforce the new top-down instructional mandates in all the schools.

The “wasteful bureaucracy” that Bloomberg claimed to have eliminated was in the 32 district offices, which had provided administrative services to schools and gave parents and local communities access to power when problems could not be solved at the school level. The services for the most part were not provided by the new bureaucracy, and were either added to the workload of school staff or contracted out to private vendors paid out of school budgets. Meanwhile, the new “parent coordinator” in each school was no substitute for being able to voice concerns to a local school superintendent having authority over principals and curriculum.

And what happened to the $100 million saved from dismantling the “bureaucracy” in the districts? According to The New York Times (5/9/03), it was used to pay for a new bureaucracy, including the coaches and parent coordinators who reported up the chain of command to City Hall. Klein and Bloomberg say the money was “put into the classroom,” but it was not used to reduce class sizes or purchase needed materials; the role of the coaches and parent coordinators was to extend mayoral power into the schools.

Measuring School Performance

Bloomberg, of course, presents all of this as a bold and needed makeover of a system that was failing to deliver quality instruction. His ads claim that he holds students, teachers and principals accountable for progress, while Bill Thompson was, according to the New York Observer, “asleep on the job” as president of the Board of Ed. But the Observer comment referred to a lapse by Thompson in monitoring the school construction budget. That failure, and Bloomberg’s separate allegation that his rival “wasted over $4 billion in taxpayer money,” were almost certainly exceeded by the mayor’s billions of dollars in misallocated school funds and no-bid contracts.

As for elementary and middle school performance, Bloomberg claims that math and reading scores went up on his watch (the latter by 27.5 percentage points) while Thompson allegedly saw a 2.2 point drop in reading scores, and no improvement in math. These figures were cherry picked for purposes of the Bloomberg campaign, taken out of context, and calculated using misleading or incorrect assumptions.

By contrast, James F. Brennan, senior member of the New York State Assembly Education Committee, made an impartial and comprehensive comparison of school performance before and after the mayor’s reforms (in NYC Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein, 2009). Brennan examined New York City math and reading scores, both fourth and eighth grade, from 1998 (the first year New York State collected the data) through 2008. He found that New York City fourth graders showed more improvement on these state tests during the period under Thompson, while the city’s eighth graders showed more improvement under Bloomberg. But that is not the whole story.

It is well known that the state tests have been subject to grade inflation. A much more reliable measure, according to experts, is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Brennan notes that the NAEP results confirm the gains that occurred under Thompson, but not those under Bloomberg. In fact, out of ten urban districts, New York’s eighth graders dropped from second place to sixth on the NAEP reading tests during the first four years of Bloomberg’s reforms.

According to education expert Diane Ravitch, Klein should have concluded from the NAEP results that the curriculum he imposed on the entire city wasn’t working and that he needed to reduce class sizes. But Klein’s response was to disregard the data, and instead make the discredited state tests the centerpiece of his new accountability system for students, teachers, and schools. When scores on these tests spiked in 2009, Klein awarded “A” and “B” grades to 97% of the city’s elementary and middle schools. As in the past, the state’s NAEP scores released less than six weeks later shattered these illusions.

And what about the high schools? In July 2009, a Comptroller Office’s report called into question the improved graduation rate cited by Bloomberg. For 10% of student records audited, schools failed to properly document completion of all graduation requirements. In addition, schools routinely awarded students redundant credits for passing the same course more than once and were often lax in their procedures for reversing failing course grades. In comments on these findings, Comptroller Thompson said, “The mayor’s managerial style has created an incentive for schools to graduate students whether or not they have met the necessary requirements,” and he called Bloomberg’s Education Department “the Enron of American Education.”

Thompson’s report may have caused the Bloomberg campaign to omit the city’s graduation rate and instead to provide in their mailings only the dropout rate, which they claim declined by 6.5 percentage points between the classes of 2006 and 2007, while increasing 4 points under Thompson. But the Comptroller’s audit also calls into question Bloomberg’s official dropout rate; at least 6% of students sampled should have been counted as dropouts in the class of 2007 and were not.

Nor is it clear what the increased dropout rate under Thompson really means. The Daily News (9/19/09) said it reflected the introduction of more rigorous graduation policies during the same time period. This is ironic in light of the mayor’s claim that Thompson “did nothing to end social promotion.”

Finally, the mayor’s mailings say school crime went down 44% under his watch while “School Violence Soared” under Thompson. But neither of the sources cited—the New York Post (6/19/09) on Bloomberg’s record and the Daily News (9/18/95) on Thompson’s—support these claims. I searched the entire Post issue and could not find a single reference to school crime. And the News editorial on school violence appeared ten months before Thompson became president of the Board of Education. It is interesting that both these bloopers pertain to the Bloomberg campaign’s most emotionally charged school issue: public safety. More on that later.

School Reform: Image and Reality

The unsubstantiated, misleading, or false claims in these mailings are part of a larger pattern. The mayor and his chancellor preside over a formidable propaganda machine. Since taking office, Joel Klein has at least quadrupled his public relations staff, which has access to the DOE’s vast information resources. He also chairs the Fund for Public Schools, a non-profit group that has spent millions on subway, bus, radio, and TV ads promoting his record. Supportive media elites include Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman—a vice chair of the Fund—and New York Post publisher Rupert Murdoch, whose wife Wendi serves on its board. Klein’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters produces a continuous flow of supposedly objective information that dominates mainstream media and opinion, from the streets of New York to White House policymakers.

Tweed Courthouse

But a growing body of literature challenges the Bloomberg/Klein brand and its image of New York City as the world’s epicenter of successful school reform. One book of eye-opening articles is NYC Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein: What Parents, Teachers, and Policymakers Need to Know (2009), available as a free download from Lulu Press. The racial achievement gap, policing of the schools, class size, and Bloomberg’s initiatives regarding small schools and accountability are just few of the chapters.

In July 2008, addressing the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, Bloomberg and Klein reported dramatic progress in closing the racial achievement gap. The Jennings and Pallas article in NYC Schools shows that these claims, based on proficiency data, are misleading. A proficiency rate only measures the percentage of students who meet an arbitrary “cut score.” This percentage is unaffected by the performance of students who already exceed the score or fail to meet it. Using proficiency rates to measure performance gives teachers an incentive to work with students just below the cut score at the expense of the majority. Proficiency rates will then improve, even if overall school performance deteriorates.

Based on proficiency rates, Bloomberg and Klein made the misleading claim that they decreased the racial achievement gap in math and reading scores for 4th and 8th graders, including a 50% gap reduction in 8th grade reading scores. But average scale scores, which measure the performance of all students, show that the gap actually widened (by as much as 22%) in all categories except 8th grade reading. There the gap reduction was 6%, not 50% as advertised. And that was little cause for celebration, since the city’s 8th graders as a whole lost ground on the more rigorous NAEP reading test. Black and Hispanic students simply lost less ground than their white and Asian classmates.

The same administration that produced these outcomes put policies into place that continue to adversely affect minority students. Civil rights activist and NAACP official Hazel Dukes has an article in NYC Schools that addresses some of these policies. One of them involved admissions criteria for gifted and talented programs. Research has shown that multiple criteria provide a better guide to future student performance than test scores alone. Disregarding this research, the chancellor required local school districts to discontinue multiple criteria, beginning in October 2007, and to exclusively use high stakes tests with uniform cut scores. Experts had warned Klein to no avail that this policy would particularly hurt minority applicants.

As predicted, in Fall 2008, there was a sharp decline in black and Hispanic admissions—with the percentage of black students admitted to gifted and talented programs falling from 31% to 13%. Five predominantly minority school districts lost their programs altogether. Klein pursued similar policies with similar results at the high school level, requiring Staten Island Technical High School and smaller, newer magnet schools to adopt high stakes testing as their sole admissions criterion. He also presided over a 26% decrease in enrollment between 2006 and 2008 in after school and Saturday programs to help high-needs students wanting to apply to magnet schools.

With Black and Hispanic students losing academic ground, conditions in predominantly minority schools are deteriorating. Failing to proactively address the needs of students, the administration relies instead on a heavy police presence to maintain public safety. Although student enrollment has declined under Bloomberg, the number of security officers—employees of the NYPD—increased to 5,200, giving the school system the nation’s 5th largest police force. More police are deployed for New York City’s one million students than for the entire 2.2 million population of Houston.

An article by civil liberties advocate Udi Offer describes the result: the criminalizing of children, especially minorities and those with special needs. In separate incidents in 2007, two students were arrested and handcuffed, one of them a 13 year old for writing on a desk. The next year, a five year old was handcuffed and taken to a psychiatric ward for throwing a tantrum. Police frequently undermine principals in matters of discipline, in one case even arresting a principal who tried to prevent one of his students from being hauled off in handcuffs. Students, parents, and community leaders have repeatedly approached the administration with alternative approaches to school safety, but the mayor, according to Offer, refuses to participate in a dialogue.

Finally, while committed to policies that have failed low income and minority communities, Bloomberg and Klein neglected one of the most effective policies known to improve academic performance—reducing class size. In 1999, the city began to receive $90 million per year from New York State, and another $90 million in federal funds to reduce class sizes. As Leonie Haimson noted in NYC Schools, this produced significant improvement as long as the funds were actually used to reduce class size. In 2006, however, the city decreased its own funding for smaller class sizes, canceling the effects of these state and federal funds. The next year, New York received an additional $400 million from the state to reduce class size. The city did not allocate the money for that purpose, however, and in September 2008 class sizes actually increased.

Admitting Failure

Although unreported in the mainstream media, the mayor and chancellor have in effect admitted the failure of their education policies. Their current long term strategy is to abandon the public school system they are supposed to be managing in favor of a network of privatized charter schools. Not coincidentally, most of these new schools are not unionized.

The chancellor is reallocating scarce resources and classroom space in support of this new policy, often creating bitter conflicts between public and charter schools housed in the same building. The city’s 78 charter schools enroll a smaller proportion of English language learners and special needs students than their public counterparts, and are permitted in practice to expel low achieving students. All these hard-to-teach students are then dumped into the public schools, which, unlike the charters, have larger class sizes and are not permitted to cap their enrollments. The administration then compares the public schools unfavorably to the charters, even though research shows mixed results—notwithstanding all the advantages conferred on the charters. Klein envisions these publicly funded yet privately managed entities as the future of “public” education. See Grassroots Education Movement and Sarah Knopp.

The purported advantages of charters—human scale, better instruction, autonomous governance—had already existed in some public schools since the 1970s, a little known fact discussed in the article by educator Deborah Meier. Compared to today’s charters, however, these experiments had a more public and democratic nature. They were governed by the faculty, with the support of principals and input from parents and students. Operating under the same resource constraints and union as other public schools, and drawing from the same student population, they tailored instruction to the learning needs of students, not the requirements of standardized tests.

At first, Klein tried to replicate this success. While lauding small school innovation, however, he undermined it by assessing performance in conventional ways. Nor could quality, autonomous schools be mass produced from his Tweed headquarters. Notwithstanding $100 million in supplemental funding from Bill Gates, the administration’s program foundered, and Gates stopped supporting it in 2008. By then, charter schools had emerged as Bloomberg’s and Klein’s new paradigm.

Along with this move to privatization, the administration’s admission of failure was its quiet demolition in 2006 of the very bureaucracy it had created with so much fanfare only three years earlier. The only thing more remarkable than this reversal was its failure to elicit critical commentary and analysis in the mainstream media; Bloomberg and Klein were permitted to declare victory and move on. Having brought “accountability” to the system, they said, the “reforms” were now entering a new phase.

Instead of being told what and how to teach through a bureaucratic chain of command, teachers are now subjected to management-by-numbers. Their performance is measured using “value added assessment,” where student scores on standardized tests at the end of the school year are compared with their scores at the beginning—the difference being attributable to the teacher. With merit pay or job loss at stake, teachers and principals now have test preparation as their primary task. That is driving authentic educators to look elsewhere for work.

Needless to say, this is no way to get kids excited about school, especially those who are disadvantaged and already alienated from mainstream institutions. In fact, it eradicates the love of learning that many students bring to the table. Test preparation cannot cultivate the critical thinking skills and independent judgment needed to be a responsible citizen, an intelligent user of the internet, or even a savvy consumer. Nor can it cultivate the creativity and capacity for innovation that the best 21st century jobs require.

This is the kind of school system that corporate elites, politicians, and lawyers create when they don’t care to collaborate with educators and want an easily quantified and user friendly tool for controlling them. It is a system for creating a large supply of minimally-skilled, diligent and disciplined service workers who will follow instructions without asking questions. And it trains the populace in mindless conformity, making the entire country susceptible to authoritarian rule.

Joyce Purnick’s biography of Michael Bloomberg came out this year. She wrote about a man intoxicated with power—more than most leaders—and who still can’t get enough. To be sure, he also cares about the city’s people, and wants to serve them well. But he imagines he is vastly smarter and more competent than all the city’s teachers, principals, and other public servants, and can forge a better government by concentrating power in City Hall. He has convinced millions, both inside and outside the city, that this is so. But Bloomberg’s record running the New York City public school system shatters this illusion. Isn’t it time for this mayor—whose mantra is accountability—to be finally held accountable for his own performance?

TV Appearances by Betsy Combier

Lawline

Contact me with a concern or issue

I assist anyone who needs help, so email me your problem to start the ball rolling! I am a teacher/parent advocate, and I am the editor/writer for this blog and the website parentadvocates.org. I also write about court corruption on my blog "NYC Court Corruption". I am interested in random injustice and the criminalizing of innocent people. If you want to chat you may email me at: betsy.combier@gmail.com and I'm on twitter and have a facebook page too. I'm not an attorney and do not give legal advice.

If you want to talk with me about your 3020-a charges, I consult and go over your case without charge. No fee.

And, in response to the lies of certain individuals who resent my work, the truth is that all conversations are confidential and I do not tape secretly.

Testimonial from an Exonerated Teacher

Dear Betsy,I am forever indebted to you, Betsy, for your expert counsel throughout a horrific ordeal. You worked tirelessly to prove my innocence in a 3020a proceeding that was instigated by a corrupt school district and fueled by lies. My proceedings ended with my complete exoneration, my record expunged and my immediate return to the classroom. We didn't even need to file an appeal! Thank you, Betsy. I am now eligible to retire and enjoy the benefits you helped me to protect. God bless you and the work you do protecting the innocent.Sincerely,Maria Gargano

My Thoughts and Raison d'etre

This blog is about the denial of Constitutional rights by the Mayor, the New York City Department of Education and the Chancellor, New York State and Federal Courts, New York State legislature, and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), as well as PACs and all parties participating in the business of public school education in New York City, to harm and in neglect of parents, children, and staff of public schools in the five boroughs. These thoughts are not simply mindless conclusions reached out of thin air, but a result of 14 years of research into the NYC DOE and the Courts as a reporter and paralegal.
I am an advocate of Unions and union rights, public schools and charters, and learning online as well as outside of the classroom. I cannot and do not support anyone, whether they be union management, government, private members of the political or legal system, or simply retired teachers with an agenda, if he or she tramples, discards, or rebuffs anyone's individual civil rights. As a reporter, journalist, advocate, researcher and paralegal, I have created this blog to inform the public about my experience working for the UFT and being the parent of four daughters who went through the public school system in NYC, as well as examine issues that flow from the massive denial of due process rights that I saw and have documented. The two most important points you should remember: first, everyone at the New York City Board/Department of Education and all Union bigs are motivated by power and money, and looking good. If anyone dares to blow the whistle on these racketeers, retaliation follows, so be a strategist; second, I am not an Attorney and nothing I write or say is legal advice, simply my thoughts. Take 'em or leave 'em.
Betsy Combier, Editor
NYC Rubber Room Reporter
http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com
New York Court Corruption
http://newyorkcourtcorruption.blogspot.com
Parentadvocates.org
http://www.parentadvocates.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/betsy.combier
Twitter: http://twitter.com/BetsyCombier
The NYC Public Voice
http://nycpublicvoice.blogspot.com/betsy.combier@gmail.com
Lawline July 27, 2011
http://www.teachem.com/lawlinetv/learn/lawline-tv-teachers-unions-the-last-in-first-out-rule/

Principal Anne Seifullah changes her image so that she can keep her job amidst sexting and trysts in the school, Robert Wagner Secondary Sch...

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FAITH

When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly. Patrick Overton

Truth Seeks Light - Lies Seek Shadows

Twins Jill Danger (left) and Betsy Combier(right)

sayin like it is

Actions Have Consequences

Writing as Music

Rubber Room teachers wish me a happy birthday (2006)

"Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all."

Rubber Room Satire

The Labor Movement

The Teaching Equation

We Can Work Out Our Differences

The E-Accountability Foundation

The E-Accountability Foundation brings you this blog which highlights issues that have or should be read by people interested in civil rights, and accountability. The E-Accountability Foundation is a 501(C)3 organization that holds people accountable for their actions online and, through the internet, seeks to bring justice to anyone who has been harmed without reason. We give the'A for Accountability' Awardto those who are willing to blow the whistle on unjust, misleading, or false actions and claims of the politico-educational complex in order to bring about educational reform in favor of children of all races, intellectual ability and economic status.

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Performance Management - Office of Labor Relations

From Betsy Combier

The NYC Office of Labor Relations, with the support of the UFT, has issued to principals a document called"Performance Management" on how to get rid of an incompetent teacher. Who is an "incompetent teacher"? Anyone the NYC Department of Education wants to remove from the system because he/she is too senior (makes too much money), is disabled (and therefore cannot be deemed factory-perfect) and/or is other impaired (is a whistleblower, cannot be intimidated, is ethnically challenged - not the 'right' race, etc).

Candace R. McLaren

Director, Office of Special Investigations (OSI)

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Polo Colon

"Rubber Room"

(1) a space where a worker subject to a disciplinary hearing or other administrative action waits and does no work; generally, a place or personal mind-set of isolation.(2) a literal reference to a padded cell, which is, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, “a room in a psychiatric hospital with padded walls to prevent violent patients from injuring themselves.”from Double-Tongued Dictionary http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/rubber_room/

"Rubberization"

The word "rubberization" is a new word that is used to describe the process of assigning and paying people to sit and do nothing in a drab room away from their place of employment while their employers make up charges that allege sexual or corporal misconduct without any facts upon which to base the allegation on.

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Theresa Europe, NYC BOE ATU Director

Robin Greenfield

Deputy Counsel to the NYC DOE

UFT Pres. Mike Mulgrew and NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg

UFT umbrella pals

New York State Supreme Court Judge Manuel Mendez

ATR CONNECT

Tenured Teachers who are found to be guilty of misconduct or incompetency at 3020-a but are not terminated, who have blown the whistle on the misconduct of politically favored NYC Department of Education employees, and/or who are simply disliked for any reason can suddenly find themselves in the ATR ("Absent Teacher Reserve") pool - employees without rights or voices, and without chapter leader union representation.

This new group of people are the "new" rubber roomers without representation at the UFT and denied the protection of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, because basically they have been pushed out of their jobs unfairly and under color of law by Mayor Bloomberg and the Chief Executives of the Department of Education who call themselves "Chancellors", "Network Leaders", "Superintendents", etc., consistently without any facts or evidence to support the false claims.

A group of teachers who are, or were, made into ATRs, ATR Polo Colon, and I, Betsy Combier, an advocate for transparency and labor/employment rights, have joined together to expose the denial of due process, civil and human rights by chiefs of the NYC Department of Education (NYC DOE), certain arbitrators at 3020-a, leaders of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the "investigators" -agents who work for the Special Commissioner of Investigation (SCI), Office of Special Investigation (OSI), and the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) - and the Attorneys who work for the New York United Teachers (NYSUT), and the New York Law Department (Corporation Counsel).

In order to protect the safety of those who join this group to promote an end to the "Rubberization" process described on this blog since 2007, names of those who tell their stories will, for now, remain anonymous if the person so desires, and Polo and I will be the gatekeepers. So if you are an ATR, or know a story involving an ATR or someone re-assigned or about to go into a 3020-a, please use the email address advocatz77@gmail.com and give us your contact information. We will protect your anonymity and hold onto your privacy.

Betsy Combier and Polo Colon, Editors

FAITH When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly.

Patrick Overton

We have forty million reasons for failure but not a single excuse.Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

The Re-Assignment Overview by Betsy Combier

The New York City Board of Education decided in 2002 to rid the public school system of staff who interfered with their takeover and control. The criteria for a "good teacher" is now, more often than not, a "silent teacher", a person who never asks questions, is younger than 40, is making a salary below $50,000, does not care about kids and what they learn, or whether or not money (books, supplies, equipment, etc) is missing. When a teacher or staff member of a school dares to do the right thing and speaks out about wrong-doing - this person is often called a "whistleblower" or "flamethrower" - or, simply is not liked for any reason by the Principal/NYC personnel, suddenly he/she is accused of something by somebody ("given a label of "A", "B", "C", and so on) and whisked away to a drab room called a temporary re-assignment center or "rubber room". Members of the offices of the Special Commissioner of Investigation or the Office of Special Investigations then start work on building a case against the person to justify their being thrown in prison, declared "unfit for duty", or, as Mr. Joel Klein has said, characterized as "guilty of sexual activities and corporal punishment" against the children of New York City.The stories of the people I have met who sit every day in the 8 rubber rooms of NYC prove to me that Mr. Klein is very wrong about his assessment, and this blog is created to prove it to you.

Puppy Snooze

US Department of Labor ELAWS

Aeri Pang, Gotcha Squad Attorney

Attorney Pang, red dress, now chief Attorney For New York State Supreme Court Judge Cynthia Kern

New York State Supreme Court Judge Cynthia Kern

NYC EdStats You Can Use

$12.5 billion: Annual New York City Department of Education (DOE) budget (2002)

$21 billion: Annual New York City DOE budget (2009)
1,719: Number officials employed by the DOE central administration in June 2002

2,442: Number of officials employed by the central administration as of November 2008

2: Number of DOE officials earning more than $180,000 per year in 2004.

22: Number of DOE officials earning more than $180,000 per year in 2007.

5: Number of DOE public relations staffers in 2003.

23: Number of DOE public relations staffers in 2008.

944: Number of contracts approved by DOE in 2008, at a total cost of $1.9 billion.

20: Percentage of contracts that exceeded estimated cost by at least 25 percent.

$67.5 million: Annual budget of Project Arts, a decade-old program that was the sole source of dedicated funding for arts education. It was eliminated in 2007.

86: Percentage of principals who said in a 2008 poll that they were unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes in their schools.

100,000: Number of seats DOE plans to provide for charter school students by 2012.

25,000: Number of seats DOE plans to build under 2010 to 2014 capital plan.

66,895: Number of K-3 school-children in classes of 25 or more during the 2008-09 school year.

15,440: Average number of seats per year built during the last six years of the Rudolph Giuliani administration.

10,895: Average number of seats per year built during the first six years of the Bloomberg administration.

27.2: Percentage of newly hired teachers in 2001-02 who were Black.

14.1: Percentage of newly hired teachers in 2006-07 who were Black.

53.3: Percentage of newly hired teachers in 2001-02 who were white.

65.5: Percentage of newly hired teachers in 2006-07 who were white.

76: Percentage of white and Asian students who performed better than the average Black and Latino students in 8th grade English Language Arts (ELA) in 2003.

75: Percentage of white and Asian students who performed better than the average Black and Hispanic students in 8th grade ELA in 2008.

77: Percentage of white and Asian students who performed better than the average Black and Hispanic 8th graders in math in 2003.

81: Percentage of white and Asian students who performed better than the average Black and Hispanic 8th graders in math in 2008.

54: Percentage of New York City public school parents who disapproved of Mayor Bloomberg’s handling of education, according to a March 2009 Quinnipiac poll.

Sources: New York City Council, New York City Comptroller’s Office, New York Daily News, New York Post, Eduwonkette, Quinnipiac Institute, Black Educator, Class Size Matters, New York City Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein.

Betsy Combier and NYSUT lawyer Chris Callagy

The New York City Whistle Award

NYC Whistlers, Winners of the NYC Whistle Award

...are those individuals in New York City who are willing to whistleblow unjust, misleading, or false actions and claims of the politico-educational complex in order to bring about educational reform in favor of children of all races, intellectual ability and economic status. Whistlers ask questions that need to be asked, such as "where is the money?" and "Why does it have to be this way?" and they never give up.

These people have withstood adversity and have held those who seem not to believe in honesty, integrity and compassion accountable for their actions.

Congratulations, and keep up the good work!

Betsy Combier

Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon

Condon "qualified" for his current post after Bloomberg lowered standards; who will leash him?

A great teacher

After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said: 'Let me see if I've got this right.

'You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.

'You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride.

'You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job 'You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the final exams.

'You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card.

'You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletinboard, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps. 'You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I CAN'T PRAY?

NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly

Joel Klein's famous statement about rubber room teachers and staff

On November 27, 2006, temporarily re-assigned teacher (TRT) Polo Colon asked Joel Klein, the "pretend" Chancellor of the NYC public school system, if he had voted to terminate teachers at the secret Executive Session held just before the public meeting of the Panel For Educational Policy.Mr. Klein answered,"We did not vote to terminate you. We did vote to terminate a teacher in executive Session...in fact, we voted to terminate two teachers. It's perfectly consistent with the law.Many teachers have been charged with sexual activities and some are charged with corporal punishment...I have no interest in removing people who are qualified to teach, I can assure you, because I dont get any return...and in fact, I have complained publicly about how long this process drags out. But our first concern will always be and, as a former lawyer and somebody who clerked on the United States Supreme Court I will tell you, there is no violation of due process whatsoever..."- extracted from the audiotape of the PEP meeting bought by Betsy Combier after filing a FOIL request to the NYC BOE

November 26, 2007 Candelight Vigil

The School Law Blog

A Review of Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools by Betsy Combier

Lydia Segal's book puts the NYC, Chicago, and California Departments of Education on notice....we who have read this book know more about how the system is not there for our kids than "you" want us to know. Lydia Segal's book Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools changes the public school reform movement forever. We can no longer assume that more money allocated to our schools will "fix" the disaster that is our public school system.

Lydia Segal draws on her 10 years of undercover investigation and research in over five urban school districts, including the three largest, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and the two most decentralized, Houston and Edmonton, Canada, to provide, in her new book Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools, the details of the corruption, theft, fraud, and patronage that has overrun our public school establishment for several decades. There is no question that anyone who is interested in school reform -this means anyone who pays taxes, is a parent or guardian of a child attending school and/or who works toward a goal of establishing an education system that puts children first - must read this book. Ms. Segal's research and information on the education establishment's 'dark' side outrages the reader, and incites us to demand change. Her book therefore, is much more than a book, it is a call to action. We cannot be bystanders any longer to the systemic abuse she so vividly describes, and we will never be able to listen in the same way ever again to school Principals, Superintendents, school custodians or district board members as they request more money "to help the children."

The book's detailed reports on the corruption and crime in our public schools, supported by 52 pages of interview notes, references and specific examples, provide irrefutable evidence that the current failures of our nation's public schools are not due to the lack of money but the impossibility of getting the money to the children who need it and for whom the money is allocated in the first place. Recent statistics show that students of all ages are not learning what they need to know, schools are overcome with violence, teachers are demoralized, and yet billions of dollars are literally shovelled into the system every year. The New York City school system receives more than $16 billion every year; Los Angeles, $7 billion; and Chicago, $3.6 billion. Where does this money go? We have all asked this question as we have walked through school hallways dodging the paint falling off the walls and ceilings, watching our children sitting on broken chairs, using bathrooms without running water or toilet paper, and struggling to achieve their personal best without the services and resources they are supposed to have. Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools is the first book ever to systematically examine school waste and corruption and how to fight it. Ms. Segal, an undercover school investigator turned law professor, documents where the money goes, how waste and fraud embedded in the operation of large school bureaucracies siphon money from classrooms, distort educational priorities, block initiatives, and what we can do to bring badly-needed change. She describes in detail how only a small percentage of the money allocated to students in our public schools actually gets used by them due to corruption and waste, and how city school systems scoring lowest on standardized tests tend to have the biggest criminal records and most payroll padding. Coding problems, the procurement process, compartmentalization and opacity of information leave administrators with only two options: good corruption (which ultimately helps the kids) and bad corruption (which never helps anyone but the perpetrator and his/her allies and accomplices). Indeed, the system fights those who try the good corruption route.

Ms. Segal argues that the problem is not usually bad people, but a bad system that focuses on process at the expense of results. Decades of rules and regulations along with layers of top-down supervision make it so hard to do business with school systems that they encourage the very fraud and waste they were designed to curb. She tells us about how the "godfathers" and "godmothers" (the school board members) obtain jobs for their "pieces" in order to protect the systemic waste and fraud from being dismantled or exposed. Fortunately, she writes, there are good people involved in the corruption as well who must violate the rules in order to get their jobs done. Nonetheless, absurdities abound: school systems following rules to save every penny spend thousands of dollars hunting down checks as small as $25; it takes so long to pay vendors for their work that some have to bribe school officials to move their checks along; caring Principals who want to fix leaky toilets may have to pay workers under the table because submitting a work order through the central office could, and often does, take years. Meanwhile, those who pilfer from classrooms get away with it because the pyramidal structure of large districts makes schools inherently difficult to oversee. What makes Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools a must-read is not only the fascinating - and depressing - details of the systemic wrong-doing but also Ms. Segal's suggestions for reform, based on the proven track records of school systems across North America that have successfully reduced waste and fraud and have pushed more resources into schools.

The pathology of the corruption suggests the remedy, Ms. Segal says, which is decentralization of power into the schools and the hands of the Principals. Distilling what successful school systems have done, Segal advocates new forms of oversight that do not clog up school systems and recommends giving principals more discretion over their school budgets as well as holding them accountable for job performance. She argues for "autonomy in exchange for performance accountability" as part of a bold, far-reaching plan for reclaiming our schools. Her conclusion is logical and convincing. Everyone who reads this book will find his or her perception of public school education changed forever. We cannot accept any longer that a generation of children has been abused by a system that is so full of greed and corruption without screaming "stop!" and "Your game is up!"

Segal reveals how systemic waste and fraud siphon millions of dollars from urban classrooms and shows how money is lost in systems that focus on process rather than on results, as well as how regulations established to curb waste and fraud provide perverse incentives for new forms of both. Anyone who is interested in school reform--this means anyone who pays taxes, is a parent or guardian of a child attending school, and/or who works toward a goal of establishing an education system that puts children first--must read this book. --

Lydia G. Segal is Associate Professor of Criminal Law and Public Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

The NYC BOE FAMIS Online Tour

The FAMIS Portal Online Tour provides an overview and demonstration of the FAMIS Portal. Computer speakers or headphones are recommended. Choose an item of interest below, or click on the Introduction to proceed through all of the modules in sequence.

About Me

Reporter, paralegal, advocate,I will investigate, search on the internet and in all data bases for information that will help a person in need of resolution to a problem.I believe in substantive and procedural due process for all individuals, groups and organizations and trademarked the term "e-accountability" to describe the purpose of my work. I am the parent of four daughters.

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